Product Description: Are you an aspiring writer searching for inspiration and motivation? Are you an experienced writer struggling with writer's block? Need something to get your creative juices flowing? If so, this is the book for you. This valuable writing resource offers over 500 writing prompts spanning every genre imaginable — horror, thriller, science-fiction, fantasy, and more! This isn't a book filled with simple one-line prompts, quotes, or definitions, either...read more

Product Description: Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War recreates the way in which the revolutionary changes of the last phase of the Cold War were perceived by fifteen of its leading figures in the West, East and developing world.

Product Description: Meet Egypt's top TV preacher Hatem el-Shenawi: a national celebrity revered by housewives and politicians alike for delivering Islam to the masses. Charismatic and quick-witted, he has friends in high places.But when he is entrusted with a secret that threatens to wreak havoc across the country, he is drawn into a web of political intrigue at the very heart of government...read more

Product Description: self defense

Josephine Mendoza escapes poverty by coming to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a maid, where she meets Rashid, an idealistic only son with literary aspirations. Josephine, with all the wide-eyed naivety of youth, believes she has found true love. But when she becomes pregnant, and with the rumble of war growing ever louder, Rashid bows to family and social pressure, and sends her back home with her baby son, José. Brought up struggling with his dual identity, José clings to the hope of returning to his father's country when he is eighteen. He is ill-prepared to plunge headfirst into a world where the fear of tyrants and dictators is nothing compared to the fear of 'what will people say.' And with a Filipino face, a Kuwaiti passport, an Arab surname and a Christian first name, will his father’s country welcome him?The Bamboo Stalk takes an unflinching look at the lives of foreign workers in Arab countries and confronts the universal problems of identity, race and religion.

Product Description: Dublin is alien territory for young and impoverished Egyptian academic Mutazz, who is preparing a PhD on Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Mutazz has enough problems with his family's high expectations and the unrequited, idealized love that he left behind in Cairo...read more

Product Description: In his latest exploration of the Egyptian malaise, Galal Amin first looks at the events of the months preceding the Revolution of 25 January 2011, pointing out the most important factors behind popular discontent. He then follows the ups and downs (mainly the downs) of the Revolution: the causes of rising hopes and expectations, mingled with successive disappointments, sometimes verging on despair, not least in the case of the presidential elections, when the Egyptian people were invited to choose between a rock and a hard place...read more

Product Description: This book is a richly detailed exploration of the complex and cosmopolitan urban culture inhabited by the Presbyterian elite of late-Georgian Belfast, which will prove to be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on the political, cultural and intellectual histories of both Ireland and Britain during the age of reform...read more

Product Description: Brought up in poverty in a remote part of an unstable Arab republic, the narrator studies Islamic law and Arabic and becomes a cleric and civil servant in the capital. At the age of almost 40 he accepts a position as imam of a mosque serving his compatriots in a richer and more cosmopolitan neighboring Arab country...read more

We think of ambassadors as simply diplomats--but once they were adventurers who dared an uncertain fate in unknown lands, bringing gifts of greyhounds and elephants to powerful and unpredictable leaders. Historian Wright traces the journeys of these emissaries, taking us from the linguistically challenged Greek Megasthenes to the first Japanese embassies to China and Korea; from Mohammed's ambassadors to Egypt to the envoys of Byzantium, who had the unenviable task of convincing Attila the Hun to stop attacking them. We also witness the dialogue between Europe and Moorish Spain, and meet the ill-fated envoys sent in search of the mythical king Prester John. What Europe still thinks of Asia and what Asia still thinks of Africa were in no small part kindled in these long-ago first encounters.--From publisher description.A history of the experiences and contributions of ambassadors shares the stories of the first Japanese embassies to China and Korea, Mohammed's ambassadors to Egypt, and the ill-fated envoys who were sent in search of a mythical king Prester John.

Product Description: The early Cold War was a period of dramatic change. New superpowers emerged, the European powers were eclipsed, colonial empires tottered. Political leaders everywhere had to make immense adjustments. This volume explores their hopes and fears, their sense of their place in the world and of the constraints under which they laboured...read more

Product Description: The bestselling author of he Yacaoubian Building and hicago turns his attention to current affairs in Egypt.In the novels and short stories of Alaa Al Aswany, characters struggle with class differences, police brutality, poverty, sexual harassment, and political corruption; now, in a new collection of the weekly newspaper columns previously published in Arabic, Al Aswany considers these same issues that torment modern Egyptian society...read more

Product Description: From the Iran–Iraq War through the Occupation, this collection of fictional short stories presents an uncompromising view of the relationship between the West and Iraq, as well as a haunting critique of the postwar refugee experience...read more